Interview: Vessel

Genre-defying musicians are common as muck these days. Especially electronic ones. If they aren’t questioning ‘bass music’ or ‘dubstep’, they’re banning words like ‘minimal’ or ‘funky’. Awkwardness is in vogue.

So when producer Sebastian Gainsborough starts down that track, it is hard to take. After all, this 22-year-old is unremarkable on the face of it. He is white, middle-class, got a first in music tech and uses the internet to publicise his bedroom productions. He even lives in Bristol.

Just another product of that city’s musical treadmill, then. And debut EP ‘Nylon Sunset’ was a house record (albeit a highly sophisticated one), so let’s call him a house producer. That suits our needs.

But not so fast. “I’m only being put into a house category because I’m experimenting with that tempo right now,” Seb, aka Vessel, aka Rei, aka Flexible Ape, protests. “I actually find pigeonholing incredibly oppressive. It just helps the club scene stagnate and drive itself into a rut.”

And as it turns out, Seb does do rather more than four-to-the-floor. For instance, forthcoming release ‘My Child, My Chain’, featuring Lily Fannon, is a fully-formed descendent of Burial, Aphex Twin’s ‘Windowlicker’ and The Knife.

Delve deeper into Vessel’s archive, and a kaleidoscope of creativity emerges. There is Ritchie Hawtin-derived techno fusing into laid-back tropical beats on ‘Miyst’, interplanetary mumbling on ‘Suspended Animation’, and electro-acoustic geekiness in ‘Nervus, Mechanic, Organum’.

“I love sound,” he says. “I really love sound. I do a lot of electro-acoustic stuff by animating a particular sound. Computers can do anything, so sometimes I just switch my thinking brain off, push parameters and go microscopic into a sample.”

This romance with sound itself, with synth glows or trippy ripples of real-world samples, is shared with Vessel’s promising collective, Young Echo. Its members, Bristol producers Kahn, El Kid, Zhou, Jabu and Seb are united by one thing: stubborn indifference to tempo.

“If you put people together like that, it’s got more clout than just chucking out tunes from the bedroom. It’s a wonderful process of feeding off each other. I’m at the computer for 10 hours a day, and without them, it would fry my brain. I’d lose touch with reality.”

Indeed, as if driving a defiant nail into that “house producer” coffin, Seb is creating a brand new genre, under the name Flexible Ape  — “a soft version of gabba or hardcore,” he explains. “I love that music. There’s something really funny about it, and I want it to be more palatable.”

Ironically, Seb creates a pigeonhole for this. Behind closed doors, he’ll be calling it “home-listening gabba”. To you and me though, it’s all just sound. Really good sound.

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